You'll feel like a zombie by the end

Rating: 2/10 (11 February 2005)

What a shame that a the first British film for a long time to make substantial use of central London (and which must have been difficult and costly to set up) should fall so far flat after the first few minutes. The film's premise is that a virus with a very (and I mean very) short incubation period has broken out of a research laboratory and has rampaged across the country in just 28 days, killing most of the population and leaving the rest as zombies (sorry, it's not a zombie film, it's a parable about epidemiology) who rage and scream and just want to infect the survivors.
Well, in even trying to describe the premise you can see where it begins to collapse. Why do the (non-)zoms want to infect the healthy, when there's nothing in it for them and they're going to die ? (If they don't die, the country's population would still all be running and jumping around, and there wouldn't have been the Omega Man scenario at the start, would there ?) How long does it take for the Infected (for that's what they are called, friends turning to fiends in seconds) to snuff it ? If the infected only come out to play after nightfall (or so it seems from the opening sequence), why do they later chase about in the daytime ?
I do like zombie films, really I do, and Trainspotting and Shallow Grave. But Danny Boyle's grasp of pacing, dialogue and character development seems to have deserted him this time. We get a series of unconnected lurches from good guy to bad guy, healthy to infected, alive to dead, with nary a consistent theme or underlying thread to hold our attention or suspend disbelief. And in any kind of post-apocalypse scenario, zom-fest (sorry there I go again) or just plain horror film, that is precisely what we need to do. The attempts to portray group bonding among the fugitive survivors are so bad that we just don't care what happens to them. Even Christopher Eccleston is uncertain how to play his role (as well he might be), coming over as neither sane nor demented (he's supposed to have gone mad, what with all the killing) but directionless. And as for the rest of the squaddies in his bunch of military survivors, the least said the better.
There is just one memorable scene, after the man-wakes-up-in-deserted-London opener. A taxi drives along an empty motorway with a burning city (Manchester) in the distance, to Fauré's Requiem. And Cillian Murphy is clearly a lot better than this nonsensical ragbag of a film suggests.
Fast editing, blood vomiting and over-used profanities do not a lasting impression make, and I've forgotten most of it already. If your attention span's more than 28 minutes, you will too.